Monthly announcements have officially jumped the shark. Facebook teasers, prediction threads here, and "spoilers" were the early warning signs, but live tweeting the releases like they're Oscar nominations or the NFL draft is another level of silliness.

Criterion has now posted a poll asking what November release people are most looking forward to. The release to get the least number of votes gets canceled. Actually not, but otherwise, why conduct the poll?

edit: Actually, to take my theory a step further, if it's true they licensed all the older Kieslowski stuff, they may be trying to take the temperature of hype for the trilogy. As well, it's a form of word of mouth if it shows "'___' replied to Criterion Collection's status", thus possibly gathering more people to their page. Echo chamber effect.

Criterion has now posted a poll asking what November release people are most looking forward to. The release to get the least number of votes gets canceled. Actually not, but otherwise, why conduct the poll?

Free advertising/publicity? If a person votes on that poll, everybody on his/her friendlist are going to see that.

I could see Criterion releasing the Classic Media sequels and possibly even the Sony ones as well, since most of them went out of print earlier this year, in Eclipse sets. Are any of the sequels up on the Hulu channel?

I hope they release at least King Kong vs. Godzilla, which doesn't have any kind of a decent release, as far as I know. I would also hope that they wouldn't relegate whatever they do release to the Eclipse line, since the Classic Media ones all all have commentaries and multiple versions and such (Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah has a Kalat commentary!)

It would also be nice if they'd release the original Mothra and Rodan movies, but at that point things start to get unwieldy.

I wouldn't count on anything other than Gojira/Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I imagine this is just a case of Classic Media's home video rights expiring and reverting to Rialto, who already had the theatrical rights.

I hope they release at least King Kong vs. Godzilla, which doesn't have any kind of a decent release, as far as I know. I would also hope that they wouldn't relegate whatever they do release to the Eclipse line, since the Classic Media ones all all have commentaries and multiple versions and such (Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah has a Kalat commentary!)

It would also be nice if they'd release the original Mothra and Rodan movies, but at that point things start to get unwieldy.

Mothra and Rodan both have they're original films available actually in good condition. The former is in Sony's excellent Icons of Sci-fi set while the later is packaged with War of the Gargantuans.

Oh, thanks, I'll check those out. I didn't look closely enough at that Rodan release, and the cover made it look like the kind of Sandy Frank hatchetjob shit that's all over the place for these kind of movies.

Oddly enough I think the ones with the worst DVDs out there right now are some of the most recent movies many of which are only available in dubbed Pan & Scan. For the classic era I think only the Kong films have any serious issues.

What value does this have besides kitsch? This is an honest question; I'm not trying to troll anyone who likes this. I've never seen anything Godzilla-related, and I'm curious as to what the appeal is.

You have to look at the first Godzilla movie quite differently. It was a lot more serious in tone, a reaction to the bombings in WWII, the destruction of Japan, the hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that killed some fishermen (a newsreel on the BFI disc shows it).

The loss of family was shown much more directly in the first film, with the scene of the mother with her children saying "We are going to meet Daddy soon" (referencing he died in the war, and they would meet the same fate), but later in the hospital scene we see the children survived, but the mother had not. Human peril was not shown the same way in the sequels.

The scene in the first movie where the kids sing in the school is one of the scariest things ever and I have no doubt in my mind that it was the inspiration for Hitchcock's similar scene in The Birds. There are a surprisingly large number of kaiju films that are legitimately good and even some of the worse off ones are fascinating in this abstract experimental sort of way (I'm thinking of Smog Monster here). You'd be surprised if you gave it a shot.

Yeah, Gojira is legitimately chilling, and the nuclear metaphor is far more present in it than in any of the American sci-fi movies I've seen it attributed to- it's hard to watch that movie without feeling a sense of existential suffering and dread.

The sequels are campy, by and large, but I would still argue that they have an appeal beyond kitsch- they're playful, well-crafted, and charming, comparable maybe to something like Labyrinth. They're not consistent, and once little kids start showing up in force they get pretty dreadful (and start recycling footage a lot, which just kills the experience for me) but the suit monster style isn't actually inherently less believable than puppetry or stop-motion, once you're used to it. The suit for Ghidorah, in particular, is a work of art unto itself.

They should hire Geoff Darrow to design the packaging. I assume we can also expect a video tribute from Guillermo Del Toro? (Pacific Rim being his $200 million CGI tribute to the genre!)

Since Janus is also holding the rights to "The X From Outer Space" and they don't seem to be getting around to that J-Horror Eclipse set anytime soon, maybe Criterion should include it as a bonus film in the supplments?

I would say this has more value to the collection, in terms of being important, than something like Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Though, that isn't to take away from RCoM. I proudly own the BD and love that film.